The Last Word On Nothing

Guest Post: Tears of the Warrior

By: Jennifer S. Holland | April 28, 2014

Recently, in a yoga class, I started crying. The tears welled up as I took a bind while in side-angle pose (look it up) and finally dribbled down as we settled into our final position—lying flat on the mat. Then they just kept coming. Soon I was hup-supping (as my husband’s grandmother used to say) like a little girl. I had to leave the class to compose myself; no one can enjoy shavasana to the sound of a fellow yogi weeping. It blocks the chi, or something.

This time, the music was clearly a trigger. Each yoga teacher has her (or his) own class soundtrack—a mix that may go from wine-spritzer Dave Matthews to songs from Grease (yup, really) to wolf howls and Gregorian chants. On this day the selection included the sweet ukulele version of “Over the Rainbow” by that big Hawaiian guy who died so young. It was a song my mother loved, one we’d listened to over and over while she was dying and that we’d played at her memorial service as we ran through her life in Slideshow. That song kills me.

So, I’m not surprised at how emotional I got when it came on. The big guy was dead (such a gentle soul and nice voice!), my mom was dead (such a loving, funny woman, also with a nice voice!); it was all just too much to take. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Ann Finkbeiner | April 26, 2014

Notice from the People of LWON: We’ve run into problems with the outfit that handles our email subscriptions, i.e., we have too many subscribers to qualify for free emails. So in line with our policy of spending as little $$$$$ as humanly possible, we’re taking the liberty of having those emails sent, not daily, but now weekly. You’ve probably been notified of this already. And just think of the joy — it’ll be like Christmas morning.

April 21 – 25, 2014

Sally Adee’s redux post on stuff that looks like spider webs covering highly radioactive waste: if not woven by highly radioactive spiders, then by what? what manner of life form has such superior resistance? and should we be afraid?

You know what happens when you lose your smart phone? when you have to look not at the phone but at the other people in the grocery line? when you can’t take a picture of the dogs playing, you have to watch them instead? Lose your smart phone, says Christie, and good things happen.

Guest Julie Rehmeyer could hardly walk — look at the video if you don’t believe that — and the docs who told her she had ME/CFS couldn’t tell her exactly what it was or what to do about it: Part I.

Guest Julie Reymeyer knows people who still can’t get up off the floor, while her docs and their national and international health institutions are still arguing about the definition of ME/CFS and still considering basing the definition on actual biomarkers — you know, tests for things in the body going haywire? — assuming they get funding for finding biomarkers: Part II.

It must be spring — Penis Fridays are back, this time featuring Richard’s tour guide in Pompeii, pointing out the ancient international symbols: “Look, a wine store!” “Look, beware of the dog!” “Look, –” no, don’t.

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The photo is a still from a movie about ME/CFS, called Canary in a Coal Mine, by Jennifer Brea, Deborah Hoffmann, Blake Ashman, and Kiran Chitanvis. The still is captioned, Jen After a Full Day of Shooting.

TGIPF: Look! International Symbol!

By: Richard Panek | April 25, 2014

“Look!” our guide said, and he pointed to a frieze at the top of a nearby building. We looked. The figures were inscrutable at first, but then the guide explained: The building had been a shop belonging to a wine merchant. We ahhh’d, not so much at the fact that the shop had belonged to a wine merchant as at the utility of the sign. To anyone who was familiar with the sight of two men hoisting a wine bladder—as visitors from throughout the Mediterranean were, back when this establishment was a going concern—the identity of the shop would have been at-a-glance unmistakable.

“International symbol!” our guide said. “Two thousand years ago!”

We were standing at the corner of Via del Foro and Via degli Augustali, in Region VII of the ruins of Pompeii. That morning at breakfast, an American at our hotel had pulled me aside to say he’d heard that my wife and I as well as another couple would be spending the day in Pompeii. Speaking as a veteran of many visits to the Amalfi Coast, he said, he strongly urged us to hire a guide. The ruins are too vast, he said. You won’t be able to make sense of them on your own; you’ll miss the important details.

In the car on the drive from Positano to Pompeii, the four of us had debated whether to follow our American friend’s advice. Now, as we left behind the previously inscrutable men and their wine bladder to follow the guide to our next destination, the other husband whispered to me that we’d made the right choice, and I whispered back that I agreed.

Continue reading →

Guest Post, pt. 2: Why Are Doctors Skeptical & Unhelpful about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

By: Julie Rehmeyer | April 24, 2014

This is Part Two of a post on myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome — or just ME/CFS — which is a disease that 1) knocks people right out of the game and 2) doctors can help with (though not as well as one would like). But most doctors haven’t a clue, often even viewing the illness as psychosomatic and untreatable. Part One was yesterday, and it left off puzzling about why doctors are so unknowledgeable.

Reading about the history of the illness made the situation seem far less inscrutable. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first investigated it in the mid-1980s, when a few hundred people near Lake Tahoe suddenly got symptoms much like mine. A couple of doctors documented abnormalities, also much like mine, and noted that the malady fit the profile of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), an illness that had cropped up sporadically for decades.

Purported epidemics usually turn out to be nothing more than coincidences, though, and CDC investigators found the abnormalities peculiar and the symptoms suspiciously diverse. They performed a quick investigation and wrote up a report downplaying the illness. But concern continued to grow, and a manuscript outlining the abnormalities was being prepared for the Annals of Internal Medicine. So investigators created a definition for the illness, but they kept it broad, disregarding the specific findings and requiring six months of fatigue along with several picks from a grab-bag of other subjective symptoms, like sore throat, swollen lymph nodes, and brain fog. They named it “chronic fatigue syndrome,” and they tacitly subsumed myalgic encephalomyelitis within this new illness (which the federal agencies now often call ME/CFS).

With such a broad definition, CFS suddenly applied to widely varying patients with few shared abnormalities. As a result, many doctors came to view the CFS grab-bag as a psychosomatic illness. The triviality of the name “chronic fatigue syndrome” reinforced the skepticism. After all, aren’t we all tired? The name makes the illness that made it nearly impossible for me to stand up or talk or do my job sound very much like the everyday tiredness most folks push through.

Enough good science would dispel this notion, but the illness hasn’t easily yielded its secrets. Continue reading →

Guest Post, pt. 1: Why Are Doctors Skeptical & Unhelpful about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

By: Julie Rehmeyer | April 23, 2014

Eight years ago, collapsed on a neurologist’s examining table, I asked a naive question that turned out to be at the center of a controversy continuing to this day. I had just received a diagnosis for the illness that had been gradually overtaking me for the previous six years, and I asked, “So what is chronic fatigue syndrome?”

A week earlier, I’d woken up suddenly barely able to walk. “Fatigue” hardly described what I felt: “Paralysis” was more like it. My legs seemed to have been amputated and replaced with tubes of liquid concrete, and just shifting them on the table made me grunt like an Olympic weightlifter. Not only that, my very bones hurt. Most disturbingly, my brain felt like a swollen mass. Speaking required tracking down and spearing each word individually as it scampered away from me. I felt as capable of writing an article about science – my job – as of slaughtering a rhino with my teeth.

My neurologist’s face was blank as he pronounced, “We don’t understand it very well.” He could recommend no tests, no treatments, no other doctors. I came to understand that for him, “chronic fatigue syndrome” meant “I can’t help you.” Continue reading →

How losing my smart phone made me smarter

By: Christie Aschwanden | April 22, 2014

A few weekends ago, I hiked a deep canyon with a couple of friends. As has become my habit, I toted my smart phone along. I set it to mute so that I’d remain undisturbed by pings and rings, and I pulled it out of my pack only to take a few photos.

After the hike, my friend drove us back to our carpool spot, and after changing out of my hiking shoes, I reached for my phone to call my husband. Except it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the front pocket of my pack, or anywhere else I looked.

Panic. Was it in my friend’s car? Or had I dropped it somewhere in the canyon? I reached to call the friend, who was now five minutes down the road in the other direction, but — oh right. I’d have to call her when I got home. Wait, did I know her number? No, I did not. It’s programmed into my phone. I probably added it to my contacts via email, never once dialing it.

A sense of doom set in, as I thought about all the other information I’d offloaded from my brain to that shiny glass rectangle. But the despair was quickly followed by a sense of release. I was suddenly free from obligation. I couldn’t check messages. No one could reach me. I was untethered. Continue reading →

Redux: How I learned to stop worrying and love the radioactive spiderwebs

By: Sally Adee | April 21, 2014

This was first published on December 23, 2011. But microbes seem hot these days so we hope this will add to your knowledge about their manifold hotnesses — which apparently encompass radioactivity (hot? get it?) and spiders. Maybe not spiders. Anyway, the post is now, somewhat reliably, UPDATED.

Last week, the Augusta Chronicle reported that a whitish, spider-web like material had been found growing all over the nuclear waste at the Savannah River Site, a Department of Energy lab in South Carolina. In the 1950s, nuclear materials were readied here for weapons deployment. Now the site is a research lab. The web-like strands were found in the L Basin, where the spent nuclear fuel is stored.

Unlike the term suggests, however, “spent” nuclear fuel is actually so irradiated that it can no longer be reliably used. So it needs to be contained in vast pools of cooling water usually doped with boron, which acts as a protective measure against the fuel rods’ radiation. The assemblies themselves, however, remain furiously hot.

This makes the prospect of any living thing growing not just near them but directly on them incredibly exciting. It’s not yet clear whether the stuff is actually alive, however. In late January, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board will start the process of testing the growths to see whether they are biological. Could these be microbes? Better yet, could these cobwebs be the home of some awesome new breed of radioactive superspider? Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Ann Finkbeiner | April 19, 2014

April 14 – 18

Our boy, Abstruse Goose, becomes as one with his electronic devices. Truer than he knows. Well. I don’t know what he knows. Truer than you might think, anyway.

Poor Jessa, age 35, thinking about losing her math abilities. And yes, mathematicians do have the reputation of topping out young. But Jessa, you’ve got a long way to go before you hit Downhill.

Spring is auction season, everything has its price; and jump-bidders and snipers, Cameron’s got your number. Turns out auction fever goes better with a little wine.

The kid who won an Olympic gold for Russia was — as is Michelle — from White Salmon. And what did White Salmon do about this? asked for his autograph.

Cassie finally finds a simple declarative unqualified sentence she can write about medicine — colon cancer screening saves lives — then, sorry, nope, not even that.

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Photo by Abrget47j, via Wikimedia Commons. It’s unrelated to any post, but it was just so beautiful.